


Mending

by N1ghtshade



Category: Robin Hood (2018)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Found Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-20
Updated: 2018-12-20
Packaged: 2019-09-23 06:01:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17074730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/N1ghtshade/pseuds/N1ghtshade
Summary: There is no changing the damage that has been done, there is only the mending.After a battle, Marian mends Robin's scarf and listens to John's story of its importance.





	Mending

Marion glances at Robin, sleeping restlessly under the blanket she’s just covered him with. “Are you sure he’ll be all right?”

“The wounds are not deep. He will heal.” John reaches for her hand with his good one. “He has survived worse.”

She knows, after the Battle of Nottingham she treated the deep wound in Robin’s chest, watched it slowly heal to leave only a darkened scar. But she gets the feeling John is imagining another time, one only he knows about. 

She picks up the scrap of blue cloth from the ground, the scarf Robin uses to hide his face. It’s worn and faded and stained, and there’s a new long tear in the fabric from this most recent fight. It would be easy to find a new one, but Robin seems very attached to this thing. He’ll barely let her touch it. 

Maybe she can repair it. There are several rows of stitches on it already, and they look different. Two of them are wobbly, like a child’s work. One is perfect and neat. Another is long, running stitches that she’s pretty sure are Rob’s work. 

When she pulls out her needle and thread, grateful she’s using them on a piece of cloth, as intended, and not on Rob’s skin, she notices that John is watching her closely. Or more accurately, watching the scarf pooled in her hands. 

_ It means something to him, just like it means something to Robin.  _ The way John watches her close the tear in the cloth is the way he watches her sew up gashes Rob manages to get in fights. There’s the same concern for the end result.

She’s not sure she dares ask. Something in his eyes says there is pain connected to this memory. Like the pain she feels when she wears her mother’s pendant, the only thing she has left to recall the woman.  _ Robin looks at it differently.  _ There’s guilt in his eyes. There’s loss in John’s.

A worn brown hand comes to rest over hers. “You want to ask where this came from, why he values it so much, do you not?”

She does. She wants to ask why, when the scarf was torn off him in the midst of the fight, rather than taking his opportunity to escape, Robin leaped back into the frenzy to snatch it. Why he’s more wounded than he ought to have been, because he went back. 

“It belonged to my son.” John sits down beside her, resting the arm that ends not in a hand, but in a metal cover, on his knees. “My son and I were the men your English were fighting, in the Crusade. We were both captured, and the soldiers were ruthless. They would have killed us all. Robin tried to stop them from killing my son. And for that, they shot him. And my son died.” He sighs softly. 

“I’m so sorry.”

“He was the only one who ever tried to help us. He freed me. And for a time, I followed him because I owed him my life. A debt like that must be repaid.” He glances at the sleeping figure, whose restless shifting has now calmed into a deep, peaceful slumber, for once unhaunted by the shadows of war. 

Marion nods. “I owed him something as well. And then it became much more.”

“I am not certain when it began, but when I dreamed of my son, after a time, I began to see the English’s face. I did not understand, then. His people were slaughtering mine, how could I possibly see him as family? But slowly, I came to see that while I had lost one son, I had gained another.”  

Marion runs her hands over the scarf, now whole again. Not truly the same as it was, in the beginning. There is no turning back time, no making the rends and tears and damage disappear. There is only the moving forward. The mending.


End file.
